Sunday, June 2, 2024

The End of the Nation-State By Kirkpatrick Sale

The nation-state is coming to its end. And thank god for that.

For five hundred years, since the emergence of Spain and England as more than a collection of defeated princedoms and duchies but coherent entities with shared customs, religions, allegiances, and language, the nation-state has been the way most societies have ordered their polities..............

But we don’t have to go traipsing around to find the best example: it is here. The America of 2024 could no longer be called a nation, in the sense of a common culture, common loyalties, common beliefs, common religion, common ideology, common vision, common allegiance, or even common language.  It does not have a common agreement on what marriages should be or how many genders there are (ABC news in 2024 counted 53 in use), or what the country’s history has been or even what year it started, or what constitutes a crime; it does not have a working system for public education in any state; it does not even have defended borders, the minimum task that a civil body must fulfill to be a nation..........

The death of the nation state may not come with a bang, and its last, declining whimpers may take a few more years to be final.  But the patient is dying, and every sign is that its final days are near. It served its usefulness for quite some time, but it’s proven useless now. Requiem for a long time in pace.

Full text: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/05/kirkpatrick-sale/the-end-of-the-nation-state-2/